April 28, 2010

Setting goals and rewarding the achievement of those goals is one way of getting your workers involved in your safety program.

Determining the structure of this type of employee involvement takes some planning to ensure that you get the most bang for your time and money. Here is a list of helpful tips to ensure your safety incentive program gets you the results you want.

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1. Consider focusing on specific behaviors: Rewarding a reduction in the number of accidents, or the number of days without a lost-time injury, are two common goals used in the workplace. However, goals like this can be circumvented by employees simply not reporting accidents or injuries (either on their own accord or because of peer pressure) in order to earn the reward you're offering.

Consider setting goals like: in the observed instances where lockout was required, the lockout was done (and done properly), or no employees during the month were observed without the proper personal protective equipment (PPE).

These goals take a little more time and effort on the part of supervisory and safety personnel because they require some level of documentation of observed behaviors, but they reward specific behaviors needed to keep employees safe — and peer pressure generated by these types of goals is more likely to reinforce positive safety behaviors rather than negative ones like not reporting injuries.

2. Don't make it a contest: When giving out safety rewards, it's often tempting to create competition by pitting shifts or departments against each other, thinking that the competition will be motivating to employees. However, a competition sets up a win-lose scenario rather than win-win — which is what safety should be.

Because a competition is a win-lose situation, it can set up an incentive for the competitors to "game" the system in order to win. Also, for those who lose, a "why bother" mindset may be what you achieve, rather than incentive to be more safety-minded to win the next time. Instead of a competition where one team wins and the others lose, reward everyone involved in achieving the safety goal.

3. Don't single out failure: Rewards or incentives should be based on the overall performance of a group, and no one individual should be singled out as the reason for failure of the group to receive an award or incentive. On the flip side, do provide individual examples of success when discussing progress toward reaching the safety goal.

4. Make the reward something that will be seen: When considering what to use as a reward for good safety performance, consider that rewards that are visible and safety oriented (for example, drink cups, shirts, jackets, hats, etc. with safety slogans) are ones that will be regular reminders of the success the group achieved, whereas rewards like gift certificates are more fleeting because they're spent — and then they're gone.

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